numbers lie / trust yourself
“These types of actors tend to jump on anything engaging and controversial… Not unlike some news media."
In my world — girl world, fashion land — "Kate" was always shorthand for Kate Moss.
That changed this month, when "the Kate pic" dropped on March 10. In its wake, I've noticed more Americans, including myself, have condensed "Catherine Middleton, Princess of Wales" to just "Kate," no need for surname or title.
The reaction to the picture, which was awkwardly edited and eventually retracted by the AP, felt outsized to me: The quantity of posts, multitude of theories, and variety of conspiracies consumed an amazing amount of real estate online, from social media to establishment media.
Of course, the public is always interested in the machinations of the British Royal Family (who are actually German, I found out thanks to this news cycle) and "celebrity" image editing fails give many a satisfying hit of schadenfreude. Plus, there was the build up of her absence, the blurry car pic days prior, and unknown quantities around her abdominal surgery.
I get it, it was all of great interest. But still. It felt really Big. For days and days, you couldn’t listen to a podcast, scroll a social media app, or look at the news without something about Kate missing, new details about The Picture, something about an affair, reheated sympathies for Meghan — it just. Kept. Going. I recall mentioning this at the time to friends and I think they agreed. It might even be recorded on my podcast, but I'm not going to go back and listen.
On Wednesday night, a New York Times push notification led me to an article titled Russian Group Spread Disinformation About Princess of Wales, Experts Say. I felt a wash of relief. I fucking knew it. I knew this news cycle was pumped with GMO memes. I read the article like a novel. It had everything:
A Russian disinfo operation that researchers have named "Doppelgänger"
45 social media accounts run by Doppelgänger that posted things like, “Why do these big media channels want to make us believe these are Kate and William? But as we can see, they are not Kate or William”
Reports of the death of King Charles 3 circulating on Telegram, which were picked up by Russian media outlets, forcing the British embassies to address them
British officials worrying that da big 3 (Russia, China, Iran) are "fueling disinformation about Catherine in an effort to destabilize the country"
A French minister blaming Russia for artificially inflating last summer's concerns about that bedbug scare in Paris
This banger of a quote from Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University: “Whether spreading it for profit or for political purposes, these types of actors tend to jump on anything engaging and controversial… Not unlike some news media."
The reason this matters to me doesn't have to do with Russia or Kate Middleton or the House of Windsor. It's about trusting your instincts in life, which includes online.
The depth and breadth of conspiracy around "the Kate pic," and everything that ensued after, felt a little off to me and it was off. There was artificial inflation to the conversation. So much online needs to be taken with a grain of salt, especially numbers (views, followers, likes), which can easily be racked up in ways that have nothing to do with earnest human interest.
There are above board ways, like "boosting" a post through paying a platform directly, and getting passive eyeballs on content by prioritizing it in a feed. And there are shady-but-not-illegal methods like buying followers, which can give an account the first-glance impression of legitimacy (especially when paired with buying likes). Then there are sophisticated groups like the Doppelgänger network, which has researchers and cops from around the world trying to untangle its network of viral posts.
My first institutional lesson in "numbers lie" was the experiment that was Facebook Video, circa 2015/2016. I worked at a digital media company as a staff writer/editor, and a portion of my job had always included some video work, which lived on YouTube. They never got a ton of views, but for as long as I've worked in digital media (2012), publishers of text have been hot for moving images. (Cue the requisite "pivot to video" reference.)
A mandate came down to begin creating video specifically for Facebook, including live streams. (I believe Facebook was paying our company, and many media companies, for this.) This immediately felt dumb to me. Video was already a bad use of our time as writers and editors, per the metrics we'd seen on YouTube. And who wanted to watch videos on Facebook?
By October 2018, class action documents were filed against Facebook for inflating its video metrics by 150 to 900 percent… which it knew about… as early as January 2015. Once again, I felt relief. I'm not nuts. No one wanted that. Those numbers weren't real eyeballs, real engaged human beings.
When something is supposedly viral or "everyone" is talking about something online, be discerning. It could be 45 slick accounts working together to get an idea trending. It could be the private business practices of Meta (or TikTok, if we want to break that seal). What I'm saying is trust yourself. Your opinion, your reaction, your taste, your perspective — it's more right than you know.